The Gaming Den

Isn't relying on kickstarter anathema to Objectivists?

I also like adventures that go into insane detail and tell you things like what you'd find if you jumped into the dungeon's privy and fought the ooze living in it. Also, another vote for Rifts. Do you remember the old great Call of Cthulhu books like Beyond The Mountains of Madness or Dunwich: Retu...

The Bygone Bestiary. It's a supplement for Mage the Ascension and Mage: The Sorcerers' Crusade which is intended to show you how to create and field mythical creatures in the World of Darkness, and has the questionable idea of doing this mostly through Merits and Flaws. You can use it to approximat...

Games Workshop's inability to leave well enough alone is hardly surprising considering that those games where they did leave well enough alone (Necromunda, Battlefleet Gothic, etc) sold until the market was saturated and then stopped selling. From a business point of view, they need to come up with ...

A salt mine would be an interesting choice for a civilization. It would likely be large already - making it habitable would not require additional excavation. Figuring out what they did in the time they had would be interesting. The largest salt mines in Europe are in Hallein near Salzburg. They've...

This is kind of making me want to see a Dungeon Delve game where the characters are totally disposable and easy to generate and the goal is to be the last one standing as you delve a Gygaxian dungeon full of monsters and traps. So... OD&D then? -Username17 This is kind of making me want to see ...

...and so with all their magitech broken and no knowledge remaining of how to repair it, they were forced to open the doors and reemerge into the World. I like it. I once ran a zombie survival game in which the players had a large stable of secondary characters which they could use for particular jo...

After all, Fallout, one of the OP's explicit inspirations for this thread, had the water reclaiming chip break and that's just a Clark's Law removed from being a Decanter of Endless Water. I love this line. However, the existence of sustaining spoons as a Thing That People Can Have massively influe...

If I understand you correctly, your intention behind having True Names was "you can beat up a boss better if you spend some time researching them." The problem is that the research system itself is dull. Making some rolls and spending some gold is not fun: it's a thing one player does duri...

The idea of avoiding HP is a noble one, because HP is both an ugly abstraction and also something that slows the game down with constant bookkeeping. However, anything that replaces it has to avoid those same pitfalls: it has to be elegant and it has to be fast. Otherwise you're merely replacing a b...

Welfare anti-fraud programs are bullshit and everyone knows they're bullshit. The only reason they exist is that working-class right wing people want to have someone to spit upon, like all right-wing people do, and so they demonise the unemployed underclasses.

Look up some of the iconic prewritten adventures like Yellow Clearance Black Box Blues; they really help to give you an example of what it's like and what players will be expected to do.

I would go the route of using Punnet squares-ish style stuff and so have a whole bunch of rolls (representing it being a long and arduous process.) For each trait in which the parent species differed, you would randomly determine which one they got; a roll which could be influenced by the magician s...

If it's simply a matter of getting underground and staying there, then the complex could have been built far more easily in a "dig a hole, build a building inside it, cover it up again" manner. It would still be vast and would all be on the same level, but it would have been plausible with...

Put the river down a 100-foot staircase from the living spaces? Another source of heat could be a natural nuclear fission reactor . Those are really cool. I didn't know about that but it's awesome. Thanks for that link. Let's just think about space for a moment. We need 10^7 cubic feet of storage. ...

Actually, at various points they have given different human races and nationalities stats. Just sayin'. Mostly you just see it in the setting-books, unless they do the whole subspecies thing like fucking Illumians and shit. How is it racist to have "Spartans have +1 to attack rolls and +1 con ...

Hot springs mean extrusive igneous rock, so no natural caves. Sadly you don't find the two in the same place unless you've got a truly interesting geology going on. Also natural caves with rivers flowing through them tend to flood during heavy rains. Be warned that even if this doesn't kill everyone...

Feng Shui. The older I get the more I realise that what I enjoyed about it was the MTP aspects, not it being a good game. I adore Robin Laws but that game really shows its age and also reminds me of my own. And I have exactly the same response to Legend of the Five Rings that Ancient History has to ...

IIRC it was published to fuck over Black Court vampires.

Every so often they might win, in which case it's meet the new boss, same as the old boss. Unfortunately, I think if the 'fuck all I want' crowd ever wins, the colony doesn't make it. Unless that happened fairly recently and is the cause of the food pressure that forces opening the door. It depends...

That's not D20, that's roll and keep where you only keep one die. John Wick has his vengeance.

My thought is that while the previous culture understood rationing, they didn't really understand population growth very well, and went in without any plan for it. Basically the first thing that happened was a pop boom followed by a crash of some sort, probably a micro-war. That would support the c...

There's a line in one of White Wolf's old Vampire books which went something like (and this is from memory from many years ago so please pardon the inaccuracy): "Every shitty direct-to-video vampire exploitation movie just makes the Masquerade that much stronger. That's why the Camarilla keeps ...

Enough for the infants of the original dwellers to die of old age, and the PCs to grow to maturity never having known anyone who had seen the sky. So, say ~70+~20=~90 years. Cool. Then you'll see recovery forests pretty much everywhere where the soil and water allow trees to grow, with some bits of...

This looks like a badass project. The Cappadocian underground cities are awesome, but those would only have been used for hiding from comparatively brief raids. They didn't have the large storage facilities required to make it through an apocalyptic event, and had wells connecting them to the surfac...